Display devices are limited in their ability to produce life-like images by their inherent contrast, the ratio between the brightest white and darkest black of the image. In the real world, brightness may vary by nine orders of magnitude. However, a display device can typically only vary the intensity of a picture element (i.e., pixel) by four orders of magnitude. Because of this disparity, it is difficult to map captured, real world intensities to displayable values. Existing methods of overcoming this disparity may address the problem by enhancing the contrast of the input image using a global transfer function, and/or increasing the saturation of the image in a uniform manner. However, these methods may increase noise, compression, or quantization artifacts in the image or result in unnatural-looking images.